Coalition Technologies

I came across Coalition Technologies when on the hunt for a career while simultaneously trying to switch job forces. My main qualification when looking for a job was employee appreciation. It was instantly clear how much they valued their employees, as well as their clients. When pa-​rousing through their website and gaining knowledge about the services they provide and how the execute their strategies I became increasingly excited about the prospect of working with Coalition Technologies. I instantly wanted to run out and tell all my friends in the web design industry as well as everyone who’s fighting to get the name of their start up out there.

The reviews they’ve got speak to everything this company is capable of when it comes to website design and digital marketing. Getting your websites ranked high on subject keywords is increasingly difficult as more and more players enter this crowded space. But Coalition Technologies has definitely come out on top amongst the competition and proved its value.

I’ve worked with and researched multiple online design and marketing companies and have yet to be satisfied with my findings until coming upon Coalition Technologies. Instead of offering one or two basic services (Facebook content/​SEO), they provide a variety of resources that aren’t just helpful but rather necessary in today’s world of social media. Whether I’m looking to revamp my website or input content that will drive viewers to my site, I know I can rely on Coalition Technologies to get the job done and produce results. Furthermore, they even provide Reputation Management services, which is a saving grace in redeeming yourself from unwanted internet trolls that so many companies are hindered by. In a nut shell, Coalition Technologies if your one stop shop for everything design and marketing.

I have been enjoying Coalition Technologies website, which has a very modern look. Some of the design reminds me of the coolest product designs in the 60s and 70s — but it doesn’t appear dated at all. Just cool. The blog posts are both funny and informative for anyone needing to stay ahead of SEO and marketing trends.

Coalition provides top notch quality work at competitive pricing.

This company reminds me of everything I miss about being involved in the Silicon Valley since moving back to Los Angeles. I’ve been involved in media buying, search engine optimization, online advertising and content creation before while being the assistant to the CEO of a company whose directive was very similar to BuzzFeed. When working in a tech oriented environment, there is never a moment where you aren’t learning something new and interesting! A company that immerses and perpetuates itself into the future like Coalition Technologies is one set up for success!

What attracts me to this company is not only their experience in a blooming industry but their ability to streamline an otherwise confusing service. The statistics and clientel only add to the overall quality that the company presents. An opportunity to be a part of an organization like this would be a dream! However that won’t stop me from promoting Coalition Technologies.

They are a great company! They have a very informative website about the services they provide. Go with Coalition if you are serious about marketing your business.

I’ve been reading a lot of the reviews left here for Coalition Technologies and I’m frankly stunned to see some of the more negative ones posted here. My experience with this company has been nothing but phenomenal. From my first interaction with their sales rep to working with the entire design team. Everyone was very professional, supportive and courteous. I particularly liked the fact that they did stakeholder interviews before starting work on the project to ensure they understood exactly what we wanted our site to be. They were even accommodating enough to build a splash page for us (
) in addition to the mobile prototype we paid for without charging us anything additional. The only problem I had with Coalition was when it came to billing for their services. All of the companies we’ve done business with have some sort of notification process to advise you when a payment is going to be deducted from your account. This was not the case for us with Coalition. I sent an email to Joel to notify him of this and he assured me that they would work on resolving this matter. We love our splash page and mobile prototype and would not hesitate to work with Coalition again in the future. Our project was completed on time and on budget.

CT does our paid advertising for us online. So far, they’re handling Adwords, Microsoft Ads, Facebook advertising, and are helping us figure out Amazon ads (Which I had no experience in before, or even knew about).
They have a high management cost (comparatively) which varies on your spend amount with them. But so far that has been a non factor.
We saved about 35% of our spend rate (on average) over the first six months we have worked with them (which is why we’re adding in some more advertising networks). Fortunately, that savings has not resulted in any fall off with sales.
If we can keep the mean and lean spend going, and find some new advertising opportunities, these guys are golden!

I worked with Josh and Coalition under ‘retainer’ (their way of handling maintenance /​miscellaneous tasks that come up when you run an online business).
The Good–
Quick responses to requests, as advertised.
Reliable development work (harder to come by these days, it seems).
Well organized.
The Bad–
$$$$. We had a lot of stuff to get taken care of, and managed to burn through a lot of money quickly. We knew our site wasn’t built the best the first go round, but we didn’t anticipate how quickly we could spend money.
The Ugly–
The employee illustrations. The green they use for their little team drawings is an eyesore and if I ever see another one of them, I may just get sick.
In the End–
Go with Coalition. As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Very GOOD design work.
Coalition provided an ecommerce site design for us (no development). The quality of work was very good. But it lacked a lot of creativity. Their strategy guy told us that their design work focused more on the sales and marketing and that showed up. Perhaps I somehow expected them to do everything on the sales and marketing side of things and at the same time be really innovative in the creative design element but that didn’t happen.
I guess the recommendation here is if your big priority is selling more or better SEO (we got improvements in both with launch of the new site) than they could be the right ones. If you want something really beautiful, and I hate to say it, «artistic» then maybe not so much.

Review:
I hired Coalition do do my fashion ecommerce website and thought I’d offer a quick bit of background on my experience and a tip–
First, this company is very focused on design that sells (converts is the term they use) and works for ‘typical’ online marketing stuff.
This is not a bad thing, but if you’re a fashion company, you might want to be more focused on just the look and feel. They’re designers seem really good at their focus, but weren’t as independently creative as I would have hoped.
We had to spend a bit more time and money to get the look and feel right in the design phase than I intended, but got a site we’re happy with.
If you are building a site where looks are the top priority, maybe they aren’t the best for you. If you want a good looking site that is more about selling and marketing, they probably are a reliable choice.

Life savers!!!
We needed a splash page put up for our business really quickly because of a big PR opportunity that came up rather unexpectedly, before our website was ready. Our in house team couldn’t get the job done without dropping the ball on some other stuff so we turned to Unilocal to find someone who could.
This company popped up and had some decent ratings so we gave them a call. They had some bandwidth and the price was worth it (we would’ve lost out on a lot of $$$$ if we didn’t have it up).
Our team provided them with a simple one page design and asked them to develop and make it responsive.
Voila– a week later we were all set and ready!
Special thanks to Nikki, Aaron, and the other team members who pitched in.

Technically competent group with good project management!
Found Coalition through an ecommerce platform that we were using. The support guy there recommended we talk to them about a more complicated integration with Quickbooks to ensure we were getting all of the inventory, order, and customer information into our accounting team properly.
Probably the first real plus to our experience with Coalition was that we talked to someone who wasn’t your average sales guy. He actually had a good understanding of the technical capabilities of the Bigcommerce API and had a number of projects that he could reference to help us simplify what we were looking for. He worked with us to get a scope of work and a quote inside of 2 or 3 days which also impressed me and my manager.
Their quote was higher than several others we received (probably one of the 3 most expensive projects). BUT, the experience and background and the speed by which they were able to put together a scope of work really helped us feel better about signing with them. Their timeline also seemed much more realistic, which helped us feel like they had a better grasp on what was happening.
After we signed, the original salesperson (strategist) led the project handoff and rollout with their development team and project manager.
Things went very smoothly from there. About a month later we had our custom script up and running.
Total rating– 5 out of 5 stars. Higher priced, but smooth, pretty pain free process, and a script that hasn’t given us any problems in two months.

Run as far away from this rip off company as you can. They quote you a price. Get your 50% percent downpayment than tell you it will cost 3 times as much to do half the job that you agreed to. i wish i would of read the reviews real customers put up on Unilocal before deciding to work with Coalition technologies. Negative stars is more like it for this company. take em to court

We had our custom Wordpress website designed by Coalition.
A few tips based on our experience (that also contributed to my rating):
1. Everything is quoted in business days. The difference between 30 business days and 30 days is big– 6 weeks vs. 4 weeks. I (my bad) overlooked this when we signed up. I thought the quote was 60 days and it was 60 business days (12 weeks). They were consistent in quoting business days throughout, so the fault really is on me for not catching it, but definitely pay attention when you’re planning your schedule /​calendar.
2. They manage multiple project simultaneously. I’ve worked with a design firm that only did one project at a time for a previous company. That meant that everyone was available at your beck and call. BUT we paid that way too (probably 5x what we paid for this site). With Coalition, their design /​dev /​project managers are handling multiple projects simultaneously. Its not a bad thing, UNLESS you miss a deadline on getting them feedback /​content. Then you move back in line. This amounted to around a 3 week delay in our project, in total, because of the 2 x that we missed getting them the info they needed from us to move ahead. Again, something that was our fault, BUT something I wish we had known before.
3. They are really good at the marketing side of design and development. We found that we got a lot of extra insight into what we needed to be doing from an SEO standpoint, just by engaging our project manager in review of the discovery phase. We’ve been live for a month now, and have a 15% uptick in organic traffic. Having been around for a few site migrations and launches, I’ve never seen an upswing that short after launch, so this is a MAJOR plus to working with Coalition (and the main reason they’re 4 stars).
In summary– make sure you plan some extra time into the project if you know your organization isn’t the fastest on turn around. Plan on having some delays beyond that. And if you hire them to build the site, also take advantage of their marketing knowledge.

Coalition has been working with our company Forensis Group on search engine optimization and marketing and they have obtained much better results for us in search rankings than we had before. In 2013 we lost a lot of our rankings and leads and so we had to get professional help to get back up before our business suffered worse damage. They have done a great job and helped to save our business and even increase the amount of leads from where we were before. They are always professional, and email or call back promptly. I really like that they have been completely honest with us and did not try to sell us on instant results, but showed us that quality white hat SEO is a process that takes time.

UNETHICAL and a TERROR to work with — To the OWNER Joel — you can still DO THE RIGHT THING. PLEASE GIVE ME BACK MY DEPOSIT. I have paid you $ 23,773. Can you please refund me $ 17,773? ($ 23,773 minus $ 6,000) The wireframes cost you about $ 2700 so $ 6,000 is more than a double mark up. PLEASE REFUND ME THE REST of $ 17,773.
I had the absolute worst experience with Coalition Technologies. I had ambitious plans for a new custom site which they told me would cost about $ 52K which would take about 120 business days to complete 5/​8/​2014 to 10/​29/​2014. This was going to be the biggest investment I’ve ever made for my small business. I made the HUGE mistake of paying about 50% of the project cost up front as a show of good faith. We had completed wireframes (which their freelance designer billed Coalition about $ 2700) when I stopped getting updates from the team. 2 weeks later, after numerous unreturned emails and voicemails, I was told my project had not transitioned to the development stage yet. I was told that another project had taken priority over mine. Being behind 2 weeks I was very concerned the project wouldn’t be delivered before the business holiday retail season. I finally elevated it to the firm’s owner Joel. He assured me the project would be delivered by the original deadline.
But I had my doubts so I asked to see what, if any code had been written yet. He responded by telling me there was nothing to show me and to be assured it was being worked on and that it would launch by the original date. When I wanted an in-​person meeting because I had never met the owner before, he said that I would be wasting everyone’s time because they would have to bill me for the meeting time, potentially putting the project out of scope. He was generous enough to agree to shake hands and meet for 10 minutes .He curtly told me to TRUST THEM AND LET THEM DO THEIR JOBS AND TO STOP ASKING FOR UPDATES and that I would see nothing for the following few weeks. I wonder if he would have behaved like that before I awarded his firm my $ 52K project.
Shortly afterwards, he sent me me an email telling me he was glad that I kept following up because after going over the project in more detail with his developer, that there would be only a 15% CHANCE OF DELIVERY BY October 29^th, the original deadline. More likely, it would be completed in December.
I’m really glad I trusted them like they told me to. I asked for my deposit back minus hours worked for the wireframes and he refused. He was willing to waive the 20% cancellation fee (about $ 10K) which is much less than the $ 23K I already paid.
I basically paid $ 23K for $ 2,700 wireframes. I repeatedly asked for a fair refund of my deposit so that I could continue my project with another firm but he kept asking to continue on with the project. By that point, his rudeness, false assurances, and inability to complete the project on time was enough for me to distrust Coalition Technologies or its owner Joel.
He then changed his offer and told me that he would only waive the 20% cancellation fee if I agreed to delete this honest and truthful review as well as a NON-​DISCLOSURE agreement, prohibiting me from speaking about this terrible experience.
In my opinion, this is EXTREMELY UNFAIR and UNREASONABLE. I will have to take legal action to attempt to recover some of my deposit. This is extremely devastating for my small business and I hope it doesn’t happen to anyone else. My biggest mistake was paying a huge up front deposit to show my trust and good faith in the company.
I should have checked the «Unrecommended reviews» at the bottom as well as seen how many reviews Joel had gotten removed.
Glass door reviews from employees are terrible as well.
*Update* he has threatened to sue me for libel and defamation if I don’t remove this review. Please see screencap.
*Update* because I won’t delete this review in exchange for waiving the $ 10k cancellation fee, (I want a full to partial refund) he has stated that he will charge me the cancellation fee, send it to collections accruing at 2%. I’ve already given his firm $ 23k for incomplete work. Please see screen cap of this email below.
*Update* someone saw my review and decided to comment in my defense and the owner accused me of putting them up to it. Please see my latest screenshot of his email to me.

Coalition helped me to design a fantastic website for my business and also was able to show me how to drive traffic to my site through their SEO services.
Thank you. I highly recommend Joel and his team!